Design Strategies for Project Leads: Managing Roles

Design collaboration is a key ingredient to a successful design process. But as teams grow, collaboration and sharing can become unmanageable. That’s why we put a priority on collaboration and communication.

When it comes to collaboration, it’s crucial that project leaders invite the right people at the right time. You need to designate roles early on to know how everyone can contribute to a project. While everyone’s work matters, it’s not necessary for everyone to participate at every step.

Designate Roles Early On

When kicking off a project, there are roles that you’ll want to determine from the start. As we discuss in UX Design Process Best Practices, you need to identify those who have a stake in the project. More than that, you need to determine what role they will play in the process.

Who are the stakeholders 

This is someone who has a vested interest in the success or failure of a project. This can be executives, department heads, marketers, designers, developers and business analysts. It’s everyone who stands to lose if your project sinks.

Figuring out these people isn’t enough.  As someone leading a project, you and the designer on your team will want to interview them so you can better understand what role they want to play in the project. Get their thoughts and concerns. Ask executives about their vision for the project. Talk to business analysts about the business goals. Sit down with the engineers to understand the technical feasibility of the project.

Once you’ve identified and spoken with the stakeholders, you’ll be in a better position to assign them roles on a project.

Who needs to participate when

Not everyone needs to be with a project from start to finish. You have to be judicious about when a particular role participates. Invite them too late and you’ll get feedback that might derail a project.

For example, leaving executives out until the very end of a project can create an unnecessary bottleneck. They might have valuable ideas, which would have been useful early on. And if the project has developed in a different direction, then those ideas could be detrimental. You’ll not only be frustrated, but you’ll be trapped in the position of treating the executive’s opinions as marching orders.

A few things you’ll want to do:

Talk to executives early on. They’ll have insights into the business goals that can help frame a project.
Don’t be afraid to kick people out. Marketing will have useful insights with messaging and at the prototype stage, but won’t have anything to contribute when it comes to visual design or implementation.
Don’t leave out developers. They know what’s going on under the hood. They can let you know what is technically possible and what isn’t. This will save you a lot of grief toward the end.
Get sales and customer service involved. These roles will be able to help you determine if the solution your team has come up with is the right one for customers.

Your goal as a project leader is to act as facilitator, not implementor. You need to block and tackle, or else you’ll end up with design by committee rather than a collaborative process.

Managing Roles With UXPin

Our new user management suite makes working with anyone in your organization a breeze. From design to sharing and review, manage it all in one place with UXPin.

A few definitions

Before we go further, let’s discuss a few terms.

Member: A person on your team with a UXPin account.
Project folder: A group of prototypes for the same product or topic.
Role: Defines which members have certain abilities, such as permission to create projects, and see beyond projects to which they’re assigned. UXPin offers four roles:

Owners: The person in charge of your organization’s UXPin account.
Administrators: Similar to an owner, without the authority to close the account or change its name.
Managers: People who oversee your organization’s projects.
Creators: People who create prototypes.
Collaborators: Other stakeholders in a project who may comment on, but not edit, a prototype.

The varying roles allow everyone to contribute in ways appropriate to their job on the project. Managers, who need oversight of your organization’s work, can see every project. Unlike managers, creators — designers and other prototype builders — do not control projects. They only need access only to prototypes in their projects. Meanwhile collaborators, such as clients and marketing experts, have the ability to offer useful feedback on works in progress.

Note: Your organization may have many collaborators, creators and managers — but only one owner/administrator, a role available to enterprise users who has the ability to add new members, determine their roles, and access billing information.

Add members to your team

The user management screen has two parts: user management itself and roles, who has control of what. For example, managers can see all projects but not add new members, while creators who make prototypes can only see their work. Naturally, owners can do anything from adding new team members to commenting on projects.

But first, let’s add one or more people to your team in the “user management” screen.

Tap “add new members” at the bottom left of the user management tab.

Second, enter a new email address and choose their role. In the example below, we’ll grant “sample.name@uxpin.com” the “creator” role.

You can also tap “add multiple members” to bring more than one person aboard at once.

The people to whom you send invitations will receive confirmation emails. Tapping the email’s embedded link will add them to the project.

Remove members from your team

It happens: people come and go. Sometimes it’s necessary to take someone off your project.

To do so, in the “user management” screen, tap the three-dot icon to the far right of a user’s row. Tap “remove” and confirm the removal when prompted. This change is immediate.

Change members’ roles

Although every team member begins with a role, they don’t have to stay there. You can change the role of a team member with the “role” drop-down menu on the user management screen. Changes take effect immediately, and you can always change them back.

Assign creators to projects

While owners and managers oversee every project in your organization, creators and collaborators can focus on their work. To do that, we need to add them to the appropriate projects.

First, view the creators or collaborators to find the team member. In this case we’ve tapped “creators.”

Next tap the number of projects — if any — to which this member is assigned. Then turn on the checkboxes for the project(s) you wish this user to access. Tap “save” to commit changes.

Collaboration With the Right People at the Right Time

UXPin’s user management tools allows you to invite the right collaborators at the right time, making it easy to change roles, or add new members to your team. Get your free trial and start collaborating with your team today.

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